Twelve months

Elias Muhanna reviews a year of realignments in Middle Eastern politics.

The year 2009 began with the Middle East ablaze. On January 1, for the fifth day running, Israeli jets continued to pummel Gaza in advance of a ground invasion that produced over 1,000 Palestinian deaths and hundreds of thousands of refugees. The war’s effects rippled across the region in an all too familiar way: suicide bombers in Iraq targeted groups of civilians protesting the Gaza invasion, while America’s allies in the region criticised Hamas for provoking the onslaught. Meanwhile, Iran castigated Egypt for collaborating with the enemy and Syria called off its peace negotiations with Israel. The region had slipped back into the trenches of its Cold War, in which a single Katyusha could trigger a massive military response and an international diplomatic crisis.

A year later, the atmosphere in the region is markedly different. Bitter rivals have visited each other’s capitals to mend fences and the media is full of reports about a new age of reconciliation and diplomatic engagement. Following the turmoil of the previous five years, which witnessed a series of proxy wars between the Western-supported Sunni Arab regimes and the axis consisting of Iran, Syria, and their non-state allies (Hamas and Hizbollah), the relative calm that prevailed in 2009 was just one of many signs that a realignment of interests had begun to take shape.

The reasons for this realignment stem from two basic uncertainties. On the one hand, there is a question mark about the effects of a new – and still seemingly undefined – American policy for the region. Indeed, as disruptive as the neoconservative experiment was to Arab power dynamics, the presence of a new administration in Washington with a different outlook and a different set of priorities has forced the region to reorganise itself once again. On the other hand, Iran’s growing influence and the concomitant challenges to its regime’s authority have further muddied the waters, as its allies and adversaries try to gauge the health and durability of the Islamic Republic on its 30th anniversary. When these two unknown variables are combined, in attempts to assess shifting American policy toward the volatile regional heavyweight, the tea leaves become all the more difficult to read.

While the entire world may have caught a whiff of the sense of optimism and renewal that swept through the United States in January, the Middle East surely felt its impact in an even bigger way. The Arabs heralded Obama’s election as though he were one of their own, laying claim to his Muslim ancestry and Arabic name, and holding out hope that his administration would bring about a major reorientation of America’s diplomatic posture in the Middle East. These hopes crested in early June, when Obama delivered his famous address to the Muslim world from Cairo. Following the speech, he was lionised for weeks by the Arab press, with some commentators going so far as to claim that it was Obama’s influence that led the March 14 coalition to victory in the Lebanese parliamentary elections and ushered the Iranian Green Movement into the streets of Tehran.

A gross overstatement, to be certain. But there was no mistaking the new American approach, from Obama’s much-discussed Persian New Year greetings, to his “Day One” strategy vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli peace process, which had lain dormant for seven years under Bush. At the same time, however, the inchoate character of this new policy meant that while many of the old battle lines had been rubbed out, the new ones had yet to emerge. The result: a sea of uncertainty and bet-hedging, as the region’s political elite shifted their foreign policies into neutral – if not yet into reverse.

Nowhere was this sense of ambivalence more evident than in Lebanon, always a trusty barometer of regional political dynamics. A historic parliamentary election resulted in a repeat victory for the pro-American majority and a surprise defeat for the Iran and Syria-backed opposition. However, rather than leveraging the win into an effort to curtail Hezbollah’s military capabilities – once a central plank of the March 14 agenda – the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, spent four months putting together a national unity government that gave his former political opponents a large share of power.

This accommodation was virtually mandated by a larger rapprochement between Lebanon’s two principal foreign sponsors, Saudi Arabia and Syria, whose leaders also buried the hatchet in 2009 after four years of deep hostility and proxy warfare. As the Obama White House signalled its openness to re-establishing diplomatic relations with Syria, the Saudis silenced their media attacks on Damascus and began to explore ways in which to woo Bashar al Assad away from the encroaching influence of Iran.

Indeed, the “Iranian question” looms large in the new calculus of Arab reconciliation. As America has shifted its attention from the Gulf to Afghanistan, Iraq’s neighbours have found increased latitude to shape the occupation’s aftermath. Their main concern has been to check Iran’s influence over the Shiite-dominated government, empowering Sunni factions to provide a counterbalance thereto. Washington’s determination to deal with Tehran through engagement rather than coercion has fuelled Arab suspicion that Obama sees an expanded Iranian sphere of influence as an acceptable price to pay in the larger calculations about America’s global strategy.

Continue reading The National: Twelve months